SETI Radio Telescopes or UFO Sightings: Which Is More Credible ?

The SETI question and UFO issue has been around for about the same time. Frank Drake, the Father of SETI, has been looking for evidence of ET for 50 years via listening for radio transmissions via radio telescopes. Advocates for the UFO phenomenon have been seeking, and often finding physical trace evidence for same for over 60 years. The only difference between the two methods is that one is sanctioned by mainstream governments and the scientific community, the other is actively suppressed and ridiculed by same. Even when by the very definition of scientific empiricism (the collection of trace physical evidence) often favors visitations of some type occurring. And continues to occur everyday.

Searching the skies with radio telescopes BTW, have yet to prove anything, although there have been interesting close calls such as the ‘Wow’ signal. And to be fair, searching by this method for only 50 years isn’t nearly long enough to yield palpable results. 100 years should be enough to get a good baseline, if it gets that far. By that I mean even the Father of SETI is starting to have doubts about picking up signals from ET civilizations, due to the continuing evolution of communication methods of human civilization that is cutting down on the stray radio signals that are emitted:

After 50 fruitless years of scanning the stars for ET signals using radiotelescopes, Frank Drake, the godfather of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is acknowledging the obvious: SETI’s foundation might well have been erected atop wet cement.

It happened this week, just days after the New Zealand Defence Force became the latest foreign bureaucracy to announce its intentions to unload hundreds of UFO documents into the public domain. The venue was London, and the occasion was 350th anniversary celebration of the venerated Royal Society. But the conservative science fraternity had never convened for a topic like this: ”The Detection Of Extraterrestrial Life And The Consequences For Science And Society.”

The assembly didn’t confront UFOs head-on (that would’ve been way too Whoopee Cushion for the distinguished panelists), but its attending luminaries included NASA reps and Arizona State physicist Paul Davies, whose “Are We Alone?” book made it into Hillary Clinton’s hands during a presumed UFO briefing by Laurance Rockefeller in 1995.

Drake, author of the famous equation projecting how as many as 10,000 civilizations might well be thriving amid the Milky Way galaxy, shared his latest epiphany with the BBC. It went something like this: As cable, fiber optics, digital and other communications technologies continue to evolve, Earth is emitting fewer radio-band signals and growing more silent. Maybe that’s why we haven’t heard anything. Maybe advanced cosmic societies have dispensed with radio altogether. Consequently, SETI astronomers are now on the lookout for optical flashes that could account for ET laser communications.

“In searching for extraterrestrial life, we are both guided and hindered by our own experience,” Drake conceded. “We have to use ourselves as a model for what a technological civilisation must be, and this gives us guidance for what technologies might be present in the Universe.

“At the same time, this limits us because we are well aware that all the technologies that might be invented have not been invented; and in using ourselves as a model, we may not be paying attention to alternatives, as yet undiscovered and as yet unappreciated by us.”

(emphasis mine)

Really? Ya think? Alternatives to the sort of linear thinking that can’t even envision an ET civilization with a 50-year technological jump on us (to say nothing of a century, or a billion years)? Well, give The Royal Society an A for effort in the Look How Radically Futuristic We Can Be Dep’t. But as UFO events proceed without its acknowledgement, this is why the captains of official science look more like museum relics than the trailblazers they pretended to be this week.

One can look at the era of radio telescope SETI as an evolutionary step.

It is ludicrous, isn’t it, to presume ET tech would be the same as ours. We haven’t gone beyond Bushmen who thought lights in the sky were other campfires, as far as that goes. Why would we even think anyone else would go the dense physical route for communication instead of straight to extrasensory perception or remote viewing?

I think we’re on the verge of another Copernican revolution, at least I hope we are, when we finally ditch the playtoys that only were approximations of the real things.

I think at the time SETI was proposed, (back in the late 1950s, early 1960s) it was taken for granted that advanced civilizations would be heavily technological and using radio telescopes would be necessary for communications.

Since then we’re slowly realizing that more subtle methods of communications are feasible as the article states.

I can’t tell you how many times I have read the words “Drake Equation” in the last week. lol

The funny thing is, I had long wondered about the decrease in analog waves and how moving to digital would dissolve our footprint.

But then I figured that any advanced civilization would have taken that into consideration and assumed we had only x amount of years using those kinds of methods of communication, and that sending out a radio signal to us — or looking for one, would be impractical.

Yeah, ‘The Drake Equation’ has been a time-worn cliche lately, but it’s still the yardstick used to measure all discussions of ETI, The Fermi Paradox (another cliche), nuts and bolts theory, paranormal theory, etc, etc, etc, blah, blah blah, ad nauseum, aw hell, you get the idea!

The truth is, all is a guessing game, but IMHO, the UFO theory leaving physical trace evidence does it for me. Some phenomenon alters the environment when it manifests itself. Mass delusions don’t change chemical compositions in grass, burn tree leaves or drop molten metal on folks.

[…] proof requires the following: Either aliens need to visit Earth (don’t start!) or we need to detect them with our telescopes – for example, in one of our SETI experiments. In either case, we’re dealing with […]